How does one get windows workstations to automatically install printer drivers at logon?
We recently received a new network printer in the office. I was tasked with sharing this printer over the network using a VMWare XP machine as the server. The printer installed fine and the printer’s visible to the “install printer” wizard when browsing the directory. I’ve been using con2prt.exe in netlogon.bat to push the printer configuration on logon. I logged on to another machine using administrator credentials and everything installed beautifully. When I logged onto the same machine using non-admin credentials afterwards, that worked perfectly as well.
When I log onto another computer with non-admin credentials without first logging as admin, however, the printers fail to install. The script returns the following error:
Failed to connect to Windows NT printer:
From the “add printers” wizard, the printers show up fine when browsing the directory. When I double click on them, though, the following error appears:
Windows cannot connect to the printer. Either the printer name was typed incorrectly, or the specified printer has lost its connection to the server.
I’ve tried enabling users to load drivers using a GPO (we run server 2003), but that has no effect. I could go around to every workstation, log off the user and load the drivers as admin, but that’s tedious, disruptive and isn’t a very scalable solution if the company grows much larger. I’ve seen visual basic scripts which can be used to configure printers, but that means putting the admin password in plain text somewhere on a network share, and my boss doesn’t like that. There’s got to be some better way to do this! Hopefully you guys can provide me with some answers.
